The Death of Cool
by nautical toilet
Summary: What a monster I've created.
1. Product Placement

_Twilight_ =/= mine. Stephenie Meyer =/= a decent author.

* * *

**The Death of Cool**

_or_:

**How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Native Americans**

* * *

Here I lie grizzled and grisly, ropes of saliva oozing from my open mouth. The lights are down low, and I'm bathing in a shiny puddle of my own soup. All I can do is let my tongue loll and twitch my fingers. In my left hand are the splinters of a vase. The flowers that were in there, Bella is sniffing them.

She smears my blood with her thumb, what into I can't see. My eyelid twitches. She sneezes and rubs her itching eye with the heel of her hand; left there is a wet stain mildly like paint around her eye. War paint, maybe? After she gets about halfway past my shoulder she hops to her feet after a third sneeze and ambles toward the cupboard.

"Jesus Christ, Dad. Even the Benadryl?" she scoffs after sliding her wet fingers all over blister packs.

I can't say much. Bella must like this, because she returns to paint around me with all her fingers this time. She's frantic, finger-painting as if it were her first day in kindergarten. She has to impress the teacher. She simply has to impress the teacher and gain her admiration. She simply _has_ to, or life won't be quite as enjoyable.

About past my hip, she begins to make big splashes. It gets on my candy-striped loveseat. It gets on my tennis shoes. It gets on my growling dog. It gets on my nerves. If I could kick out my foot, I would. But I think I can deal with a little bit of blood spattering, not a whole soaked-through mess.

Although Bella has been near finished for a minute, I feel as though she isn't. Once the sun is set she'll pull it back down and tweak its rays. I am correct -- she rolls up my pant legs, unbuttons my shirt, smoothes back the hair on my forehead, pulls off my shoes and socks. None of the figures she paints I know. They're all Greek to me. I imagine she paints a target right over my heart. That's what it feels like, anyway. Smooth, jerky dips over my knee caps; squares, probably. Full handprints on each cheek. She grins down at me as she squeezes my cheeks together with her sticky hands.

"When's the last time you shaved, old man?"

She's finished with me then, after one quick kiss to my nose. She hops up gleefully to her feet, and nudges the dog away gently with her foot as she runs back into the den where _he_ is.

He comes back out soon with a grave and serious face. A rolled-up newspaper is in one hand and a lighter in the other. He's about to smoke the biggest cigar in his life then, I suppose.

* * *

I didn't meet Bella's mother in a silly drunken hook-up like you might think.

I was browsing through Walgreens, looking for cough syrup at one o'clock in the morning. They had all those generic brands with ugly labels. I picked up a bottle of Robitussin and scurried up to the check-out. The cashier, she gave me bedroom eyes.

It was a cough syrup hook-up, if you want to call it anything. We ran hand-in-hand to my car through the pouring rain and in the backseat she exposed her lumpy, thirty-six-year-old body to me. I accidentally scraped my nose on her nametag -- Renée was her name, a fact I hadn't even thought about before. We made love slowly and sensually, occasionally poking our heads up to make sure the parking lot around Walgreens was empty. It was. Until three o'clock when a shady looking character would split us up for good.

I went back to my art school. Renée went back to her job as a cashier. Two months later she called me, by digging up the receipt. I could hear her biting her lip over the phone:

"Hello, is this Ed?"

"Edward Cullen, yeah. May I ask who's calling?"

"Renée, you know."

"Yeah … Renée."

"You know, Renée from Walgreens? Your car. A rainy night."

"Oh! _Renée_! From _Walgreens_! How're you doing?"

"That's what I'm calling about." She was breathing heavily into the phone.

"Really? What's anything got to do with me?"

"_You_. You've got a lot to do with my current situation. See … I'm _pregnant_."

"Well, you're sure I'm the father?"

"Don't try to deny it!" she shrieked. Then she calmed down slightly, from an unknown source. "Yes, you're the only man I've made love with in over a year." She said this almost accusingly, as if I were the perpetrator of a bloody, violent crime.

I rebelled. "Well, shall we meet?"

I moved in with Renée after our chat over coffee (where she sported a bit of a pouch). As she grew increasingly fat, increasingly unable to work at Walgreens, I had to get a job. They hired me at Walgreens, though. Late-night shifts.

I was there for the birth of our beautiful Isabella Swan Cullen. One of my classmates at the art school especially liked the name; he listened to Insane Clown Posse and had hatchet-man decals on his Jeep.

Once Bella was born, I was fired from Walgreens. I'd accidentally been slipping Robitussin into my pants pockets for the last two months. Charlie, the manager, had just found me out. Renée was outraged that I had tainted her Walgreens reputation. For that, she threw me out and Bella was given one hundred and fifty dollars a week out of my paycheck at Kroger's.

Life went on. I graduated. Bella grew up. Renée relocated to an Indian reservation in North Dakota to be with her Internet boyfriend. She took Bella along with her. I stayed in Chicago. I could've vetoed this all of course, at the judge's office. But had I, the future wouldn't have near as interesting.

* * *

About six months ago I received a letter in the mail. It was from a circuit court out in North Dakota. Judge Rush. Full parental custody awarded to Edward Cullen.

It was fake.

Circuit was spelled _sirkit _and hearing was _herring_. I chugged some Pepto-Bismol and let the letter hang from my fingers for speculation. It said, also, Renée would be sending Bella out on a plane later that week and I was supposed to pick her up. Behind the letter I found a check for one hundred and fifty dollars folded neatly.

I smiled a little.

_

* * *

_

Bella, surprisingly, didn't show up at the airport alone. A tall, dark-haired savage had his arm around Bella's shoulders (sour-faced Bella, sucking on a Warhead, although I'm sure it would have been the same if she hadn't been). He squinted at me from beneath his bushman eyebrows.

I smiled at Bella; she frowned at me in response. The great brute loaded me down with her luggage, then he wrapped his arm back around Bella's shoulder. She didn't seem to stagger. I didn't say anything to her until her escort was gone. Although I did feel as though we were being watched.

"Have a good summer so far?" I asked as we got into the car.

She shrugged. "It could've been better."

"Starting school on … August 15th?"

Bella strapped herself in, then looked at the ceiling thoughtfully. Repulsed, but thoughtful. "At Polk, we don't start till the 20th."

"Really? It's different out here."

"Obviously, Edward."

"No. Call me Dad."

She chuckled venomously. "How about Dadward?"

"If anything, _Ed_."

"Okay, _Ed. _So where do you live, _Ed_? What do you like to do on the weekends, _Ed_? Where do you work, _Ed_? Do you have a girlfriend, _Ed_? Do you play poker with your buddies, _Ed_? Do you have a pet, _Ed_?"

I explained to Bella that I painted, I lived in a studio apartment. She didn't say another word. In fact, you might say she had her breath hitched.

* * *

Bella started decorating her room the night after she moved in. She duct-taped long strings of beads from her doorframe, set up a frog aquarium on her dresser, tacked glow-in-the-dark stars and moons on her ceiling, smoothed posters of Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner onto her walls, lighted incense and devoured a book bolstered by sado-masochists. The title escapes me at the moment.

I had predicted she'd step out tremulously and sour-faced after constructing her teenage paradise. Her hair in a messy topknot and her feet in Hello Kitty slippers, she came out while I was typing out an e-mail to a gallery owner in Ohio.

I watched her -- her shoulders sank back as she observed a painting of Carrie Bradshaw being sawed in half by Mr. Big wielding a maxed-out credit card. Her face was still frowning; the dark and upset eyebrows she had inherited from me in a crux.

"His eyes … they're so wild," she whispered to me, turning her neck, swathed in purple bathrobe.

She still frowned.

"You think so?" I smiled.

The next morning, with a mug of low-pulp orange juice hovering near her mouth, Bella sat on a stool while I painted for the gallery out in Ohio. I figured that she would eventually get bored, so I tried to stir up a little conversation:

"So, what do you like to do?"

She shrugged. "Read. Bathe. Eat. Sleep."

"What about writing? Do you like to write?"

"No. I hate writing anything. Essays and stuff suck really bad."

"I did, too, when I was fourteen."

"I'm fifteen."

"Right. So have you ever painted before? I mean, if you haven't I could set you up a little spot over there by the window …"

Her eyes trailed to window. She frowned even deeper. "I took art class back in Polk … but that's it. I wasn't very good. I got a C in there." She sounded a little embarrassed.

"Funny," I whispered as I painted Burt Reynolds' moustache, "my art teacher in high school gave everyone an A."

"Why's that?"

I licked the sweat off my lip. "'Everyone's got a brilliant idea,' he said, 'Just everyone expresses their brilliant idea in a different way.'"

She looked baffled. "But that was _art_ class. Not a free-for-all class or something."

"Yeah, but he could _see_ it. Even if a knight in shining armor ended up looking like a monkey riding dog-back. He could see it."

"You believe that too?"

I sighed and rubbed my chin. "Honestly, no. I don't. It's a nice thought, though."

She looked as if she were about so say something heatedly, but then settled back into her cross-legged position on the stool. "You had me going there for a minute, _Ed_."

"Can I ask you something, Bella?"

"What?"

I slanted my gaze towards her. "Why did your mother send you here?"

She shrugged. "More time with her boyfriend? I don't know. They're getting married next spring at the reservation."

I nodded. "Ah, so what's he like? Good, bad, ugly?"

"He's nice, I guess. He's kind of weird, with all that Indian crap. But he works at the casino. Funny. One time he hung a drunk guy by his boxers from the totem pole outside the casino. That was pretty funny. I guess he has a sense of humor."

"Your mom like him a lot?"

Her face looked slightly repulsed, as if I'd asked how many times they fucked a day. "No, Ed. She hates him." She rolled her eyes. But she added as an aftertthought: "They _are _all over each other all the time, though. You'd think after a few years they'd start calming down a little."

"Yeah."

"What about you, Ed? Do you have a girlfriend? I bet with a job like this you can get a lot of ass."

"_Bella_. I'm still your dad."

By her look, I could tell she thoroughly disagreed. She stayed there until the late afternoon, though, when she hopped off the stool, announcing we needed dinner right away. Before clawing through her beads, she stopped to stare at Mr. Big's ferocious eyes.

* * *

School started on the fifteenth of August. Our dawn-to-dusk painting sessions stopped; Bella was out of the house before I even woke up.

One morning I was out of aspirin, so I went over to a sort-of friend's room down the hall, Alice Brandon. She had all kinds of pills. Looking into her purse was liking opening a bag of Skittles.

Honestly, I hadn't seen her very much all summer. She'd come and gone so much, I'd almost forgotten she still lived in the apartments. When I opened her door, however, it wasn't she who answered.

"Who is it?" snipped a tall, blonde girl suspiciously.

"I'm, uh, Alice Brandon's neighbor, Ed Cullen? I was wondering if she was around?"

She didn't look convinced. "She's showering … why do you need her?"

"I need some aspirin," I said pathetically.

Her face didn't automatically brighten with resolution or what have you. Instead she stalked off to the bathroom with the door still a slice. I nudged it open further with my foot.

"Alice!" she yelled through the bathroom door. "Alice! Do you have any aspirin?"

Alice cracked the bathroom door open. I saw her small head, her petite hands rummaging through her purse. "Here, take these to 'im," she said quietly. The blonde girl huffed and dropped some aspirin into my palm.

"Here, sorry for all the trouble, Ed." She shut the door.

I swallowed them down with a glass of Mogen David.

--

I was somewhat shocked to see how quickly Bella had made friends. Every other night there was a stringy-haired boy pushing his hair over his shoulder as he passed through Bella's beads. It wasn't until after they emerged that either looked the least bit glad to be together. She did always stop to glance at the Sex in the City painting; she never showed it to any of her friends, though, explicitly.

One of her friends soon became her boyfriend. Nunzio, the Italian exchange student.

It took me a while, but I figured out why she liked him so much: he always smelled like patchouli and his hands always were spattered with paint. But that wasn't the only thing.

While talking to him, Bella always leaned up against the wall next to that painting. As she would nod, her eyes would flicker from Nunzio's to Mr. Big's so many times it was dizzying.

Nunzio was very interested in me, always asking things and borrowing things and being around me. I wondered sometimes if he was just dating Bella so he could be around me, if he was a homosexual. But he really did like Bella a lot, I think. More than she liked him anyway.

She always kept her cell phone in her bedroom, in her backpack. Always away from me when Nunzio wasn't around.

One day, she left her phone at home.

I got my hands on it, a little too eagerly. I flipped through her text messages, wide-eyed. There were naked photos she took of her chest, her legs, her bum, her armpits. However, the majority were of her crotch. I always thought of myself as a passive parent, never a hands-on father. Was I disgusted like I should be? I swallowed and set Bella's phone back on the table.

While I started painting I mentioned, in my daze, "You left your phone home today."

"Oh." She didn't look or sound the least bit nervous.

"Could I ask you something Bella?"

"What?"

I shrugged into my bathrobe. "Do you and Nunzio … are you and Nunzio … do you have sex?"

She rested her hands on her stomach and belched. "Nope."

"Then why," I blurted nervously as I dotted Eva Mendes' face with moles, "are there so many nude pictures on your phone?"

"References for a painting," said Bella, as she ambled off to her bedroom.

I drew Eva a Burt Reynolds moustache.

* * *

My ego is famished. Feed it a review.


	2. Cavegirl, Interrupted

Look at that.

* * *

**The Death of Cool**

_or:_

**The Modern Prometheus**

* * *

Bella begins drizzling Pepto-Bismol over my naked legs, like one might on a foot long, to Tone Loc. That's what she went to the den to get, I see. It was under the cushion in the loveseat, she tells me as she enunciates _wild thang_. She and the savage are grinding together and grinning -- his brown nipples are standing at attention as he drops to his knees and spreads the newspaper under my legs.

"The floor's so nice," he explains.

Laying next to my opened fist is his long black pigtail, when he lies flat on his back. Bella finishes grinding her mosquito bites against the stereo and approaches us here on the ground. Maria Callas begins to yowl in my ears as Bella knocks over a good deal of potted plants as she kicks back her legs -- the savage is making her tailspin into paradise-ecstasy-failure-launch-no without even unzipping his pants. She rides him like one of those insert-coin-here horses outside Walgreens. Only he's painted in a less glossy color and she sticks her tongue into the slot. That grim line is now vagina to a phallic tongue.

"Dad, Ed, Dad, Ed, Dad, are you watching?" Bella yelps out as she comes again.

I would say yes. Yes, honey. I'm watching you here on the floor. I'm getting sort of hard. Can I join? I'll even sketch it for us. Yes, that's what I'll do.

My fingers twitch. They are lively and vivacious and full of life, but they are increasingly dead. When the savage's pigtail spills into palm, I clamp it hard with my stony fingers and listen to him unzip his member. Bella looks so joyful her eyes are springing a leak. I work the hair tie off by rolling it down very gently. His hair is so very soft and velvety.

"Ah, Bl--Agh! Ja--Bl! D--Ja--E--Agh!" screams Bella as she climbs aboard.

The dog begins to growl and half the savage's glossy hair is released from its pigtail. So wavy and nice.

* * *

Nunzio and Bella, I learned, were very enthusiastic about sex. Like any good father, I scrubbed the cum stains from her headboard with a toothbrush, boiled her Hello Kitty sheets and dropped the used condoms out the window after filling them with acrylic paint. I hit a few cars.

Bella came home frequently with Nunzio in tow. I had mentioned he hovered over me quite often. I pressed my ear to their door. "Ed!" he gasped. What did Bella gasp? Nothing as far as I could hear. They were panting very heavily. After browsing some the next day, I found something long, purple, studded and strapped. Several nights, I listened to their (Nunzio's) screaming and yelping.

I couldn't really stand it anymore. Pam Anderson in her _Barb Wire 3 _outfit ended up as Jimmy Carter in a leather pantsuit.

"Nunzio," I began sadly, after pulling him aside. I was careful to put my hand on his shoulder and everything. "I really want to know something, honestly: Do you love Bella?"

At this, Nunzio fiddled bashfully with his digital camera. "We 'ave only been two-gathered for three weeks. She is a bee-ooh-tiff-hull source of perspiration, but sadly I willing be returning to Roma soon for my grand-papa … and … we will not have enough time, Ed."

"'We'?"

"Ah, me and Bella. Do not worry, Ed," he smiled shyly. "I would never-uh cheap on your luckily doter."

I flexed my shoulders a little and stared him down. "I always have this feeling you've wanted more a relationship, but not with Bella. Is it true?"

Nunzio looked read to cry. "Ed! No, why you find out? Why you find out? Bella tell you? Now I blubber, miss words like a goddamned Greek!"

"A lot of Greeks were great, Nunzio. Jimmy the Greek, Achilles, Oedipus. Great guys."

Nunzio left the apartment with a little grazing kiss on my cheek and a memory full of heterosexual-homoerotic poses on his digital camera. I found print-outs of Nunzio and Bella's heads squished together in the trash the next day. Later on I found the strap-on in the bathroom trash under a thin layer of used tampons.

Bella found a new picture to stare at.

* * *

She liked the one I'd just finished a lot; I could tell. She lie on her stomach in front of it while it dried, Peter O'Toole smoking a Cuban cigar while riding on the back of Joe Camel. I'd sketched it after watching _Lawrence of Arabia_.

In a way, I was beyond flattered by her constant attention; spending the nights and weekends observing my technique, buying canvases for me after school, cleaning my brushes, filling my palette, scrubbing the stains off my clothes. Sometimes she asked me to paint, and I let her. Never on mine, of course.

All the faces she sketched were heavily shaded and grossly deformed (something she seemed unaware of), her fingers always silver and her face always like Chuck E. Cheese.

"Do you still e-mail Nunzio?" I asked as she ladled minestrone into her mouth. She set the bowl down and lapped like a dog at it.

"No."

"No?"

"No."

"Why not? He was such a nice guy."

She snorted like a pig. "For one thing, he's _queer_. It was the first time in my life I had to use toilet paper to clean off my hands."

"He went back to Rome, he said, for his grandpa."

"Yeah, so?"

Bella sat in her fuzzy bunny slippers and her Banana Republic reclining shorts, her KY-107 tee (won on vacation in San Francisco during a radio call-in along with a mug and two tie-dye afghans), her hair in pigtailed buns, and a strawberry Slush Puppy dampening her lap. Her lips fixed on it very often until it was near empty; when that occurred, she rushed up to fill it with water and take a bathroom break.

She proclaimed, loudly, when she got back, she liked the small smile I had while I painted.

"Thanks."

* * *

Bella has flicked on the television in the den. I hear her scream, "Attica, Attica!"

_Law & Order_, I presume.

* * *

One summer vacation, Bella actually came to stay with me. That was when she was four, and I was still working at Caesar's Pizza in the Wal-Mart plaza. Renee reminded Bella frequently of this, although she always demanded we go to Chuck E. Cheese.

Renee stared me down suspiciously with her non-lazy eye. "Make sure she calls home every night."

Even with the long distance charges. "Sure thing."

She left, after snorting some nasal decongestant in the bathroom, while Bella snoozed on the couch. Five minutes later, Renee was back knocking on the door. "It's me, Renee, your ex-girlfriend," she said when I wouldn't let her in.

"Yeah." She rocked on her heels. "Bella likes this one kind of chip … like, they're these little cheese things you can get at Wal-Mart for, like, a $1.89. Sometimes that's _all_ she eats. So, yeah, just, uh, warning you."

Renee left with her hands dug deep in her pockets. I watched her stash some mints on the table in them.

Bella slept until midnight, then woke up. I wasn't sure what to do, so I gave her some Velveeta cheese. She ate it right up. In fact, she ate the whole log.

I bought her spray-can cheese, string cheese, cheese crackers, more Velveeta, and a whole pack of individually wrapped slices. She enjoyed them a lot.

Then I bought her those little cheese-flavored chips Renee had told me about; Bella hacked them up half an hour later.

* * *

A letter on September 26th:

Dear Mr. and Mrs. Cullen,

I am so happy to tell you what a wonderful student your Bella is. In the classroom, she displays tremendous work ethic, creativity and a positive attitude. It is such a joy to have her in my classroom. Even after the current trimester, I hope to have Bella in my classroom again in the near future.

Sincerely,

Jasper Whitlock

* * *

"I got a letter from one of your teachers," I told Bella while we wolfed down takeout at the breakfast nook. "He said you were a good student."

"Oh. From who?"

"Whitlock, I think."

"Oh. _Him_."

"What kind of teacher is he, anyway? I mean, it'd be nice knowing what all the hype's about."

Bella kept watching my knuckles intensely. Hairy, blushing knuckles. Good God, Bella. Like she wanted to transplant my chopsticks with a paintbrush and smudge my face with acrylics.

"He's the art teacher."

"What? I thought you said you weren't taking art."

She cleared her throat. "Well, yeah. I did. But I decided since … I've been with you I thought maybe something rubbed off on me, you know."

"I don't think it happens like that."

Bella stuffed her face full.

* * *

"Jacket. Where's that jacket?"

Bella was digging through the closet for an leather jacket I'd mentioned offhandedly while painting the neighbors' lesbian cockatoos. (It had been very cute, their rubbing their cheeks together. Bella had cawed; they fluttered and re-perched.)

"I'm not sure if it's even there anymore … C'mon, we have to go soon."

She rubbed her chin gruffly and squeezed the door shut, scowling. Her jacket looked like it was cringing when she slid her arms through the sleeves and puffed the collar up like she was a gangster.

"It wouldn't match your shirt, anyway."

"I don't care. I still want it. I'll keep looking for it when we get home."

"Tenacious, eh? What you want it for so bad?"

She crawled into the passenger seat. "I--In this magazine … I saw this look. That whole '70s hippie thing."

"Thanks," I said flatly as we pulled out.

* * *

The parent-teacher conference at that school was one of the easiest I'd ever seen. You knew who was who once you tapped your ugly brown loafer on the sweaty blue welcome rug. It was easy and almost predictable; the Spanish teacher had zero takers, the history teacher had one bald man and his football-playing son chatting, and the art teacher had Wisteria Lane flocked around him.

Bella and I stood around with our hands deep in our pockets, whistling until the table around the art teacher cleared up.

This Whitlock man was probably nearly forty, these big kooky glasses and a Beckham bouffant. Plaid blazer and ripped jeans.

"Hey there, Bella," he said almost excitedly as Bella tromped up to his plastic table. Behind it was a bit of talent on display; there wasn't much there.

"Hi, Mr. Whitlock. This is my dad." She shot a look over her shoulder at me. "He's kind of shy."

"Not really." I smiled at him; he didn't smile back. Actually, he was looking me over. Like maybe what a boar does before charging you (Bella was following suit quite nicely).

"You're Ed Cullen, right? I've seen some of your stuff downtown."

"Ah, really? Where?"

"In the bathroom at Chuck E. Cheese, of course. I like your style … it's _fun_."

* * *

That night, Bella found the leather jacket. She didn't like the color very much (it was a kind of fawn color she was so used to seeing at the reservation). But she fiddled with the fringe when we went out to lunch on Saturday. Bella, after I'd pulled into the McDonald's parking lot, suggested we go to Chuck E. Cheese instead.

"You know, I'd like to see some of your teacher's work. Is he that good?"

"Don't worry, Ed. You're still amazing."

I shrugged. "Of course, what I am so worried about? He's a high school teacher, for Christ's sake. You know the old saying: 'Those who can't do, teach.'"

Bella pressed down all the buttons on her Coke.

* * *

Instead of wearing the jacket outside the apartment, Bella wore it inside. Her Hello Kitty bathrobe lay crumpled at the bottom of her hamper as she flayed a layer of applesauce off her spoon.

She liked the jacket all right, she said, but refused to wear it outside the apartment anymore because it "combed out her tangled spirit and let it flow in the wind." If I asked her to get the mail, she shrugged out of it quickly into a heap by her stool and smoothed the wrinkles from Hello Kitty's whiskers. She'd hunch out, then back in with a fistful of envelopes; after pressing them down on the table (maybe to dominate them with her thumb) she'd collapse onto the loveseat and snooze. I hid the jacket in my closet after it became a wash-rinse process.

Bella didn't even miss it. In fact, she started washing her bathrobe with the towels every Sunday. It was a rich, purple terrycloth that her Renee had purchased for her right before leaving, God knows why.

One night she sat cross-legged on the loveseat with a catalogue in her lap, a banana lodged down her throat: "Oh my god, Ed, theiwaza paira swippers iwat."

"Let me see, l'emme see here." She plopped the catalogue onto my palms (it slapped) and stuck the paintbrush in my teeth. Her mouth had a rinse cycle of banana spinning around in it.

She kept tapping a picture of a girl's legs with the slippers on. Under the purple insoles Bella was imagining wriggling her piggy toes inside while sipping a frappé from the little Greek café four blocks away.

"We'll see," I said, and tore a little corner of yellow paper from my planner to mark it.

After she closed it and flopped back onto the loveseat, I noticed it was a _McCall's_.

* * *

A lot of times, especially since Alice was stable for the most part, her young roommate Rosalie came by for flour, for sugar. For conversation.

Through Bella, however, I learned that Alice and Rosalie were lesbian lovers; Alice had met Rosalie up in Minnesota while giving a lecture at the university. Rosalie had just happened to want to renounce her Gophery. Their love affair was still tense and blurred and boiling -- somewhat titillating their mailbox with furious letters from Rosalie's viking relatives. "Tip a cow, save yourself," Rosalie said once while reading one and disappearing into her large gray Gopher sweatshirt.

The frequent contact kind of softened our awkwardness (eventually she was ticking off the pros of her newfound lesbianism to Bella every other night, cringing at the mention of Nunzio). One day, Bella came back from Alice's with a message on the napkin. It invited us to brunch on Sunday on Alice's lanai (something I couldn't quite afford, my not being forty and entirely successful yet).

"Sounds nice," I said, without much thought.

* * *

(My ego's BMI went up roughly 50%.)


	3. Yogurted Tagati

Ach-ach-ah.

* * *

**The Death of Cool**

_or:_

**The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance With Death**

* * *

I think, in my wrinkling and shrinking hand, that there is a hair tie. That it came from the savage's head and that I couldn't clench the pigtail and rip off part of his scalp. If that would be possible. My foot (it has gained consciousness, and is very eager to aid me) slides up Bella's spine when she angles herself only inches away from me. To straddle the savage, that is. In the parlaying of truth and justice, she does.

But she freezes and I hope something _clicks. _Like a moment in time that has been washed around in her brain for the past few days, that's been locked away in a cuckoo's throat. I wait for her head to swivel around, maybe enough to that I can see her pinched profile. No, no.

"Stop it," says the savage.

"I don't need to," I croak back. First time, first time. I'm gaining survival; I'm retaliating against the mess!

Bella's profile does come into view shortly after I get to the base, where a tail might've grown out if her mother had sipped a vodka and coke during _Maury _in the afternoons (or if I'd discovered my strange tastes as an adolescent). Her mouth is stretching like a rubber band – oh and ah abounding and dampening the spirits of the savage, who is currently lacing his fingers with Bella's toes. If I could sit up on my own tailbone, I'd do the same. Dear me, though. I might not have to do a thing if this keeps up. It's a low, vile move, but I am no Lancelot, King Arthur.

My facial nerves are crawling back. I smile. "That's a girl. Remember? That's the way."

She appears in somewhat delight, and sincerity as she kneels down to me and grabs my hand, as if to pull me up. "Not yet, not yet, honey," I whisper into her ear. The savage watches us with his distraught beetle eyes. And picks up one of Bella's feet and begins to massage its weary little sole (by now, I'm sure she's eager to dash under the covers and dream about the lovely plains of the Dakotas, stick a feather in her cap, call herself Macaroni). _Dad-Ed-Dad _scrambles to his knees in a mad-dash and slashes his thumb across the savage's eye-bumpy-bridge-eye. These talons, they do fair!

Bella crawls under one of my shoulders, with a sheepish-getting-back-into-her-mind kind of look. I shrug and say, "Are any of us in our right minds today?" Here is the connecting father-daughter moment that we've skirted all along! Here is the second that I should slip into my wet and sticky pocket and never forget! Then I do something sickening, sickeningly atrocious when she brings me a Vicodin and a shot of cactus juice – I pet her jaw a moment and melt anything filial that might have occurred a moment ago. She agrees completely, seesawing that Vicodin between our tongues before it finally teeters down my throat and I swallow and she sucks in some air. "Where've you been, sweetheart?" I wheeze.

"Some place far, far way."

* * *

Alice's lanai was hideous and unbearably atrocious. At least, it looked that way with all the clouds out. She didn't appeared fazed by anything, however, with a piece of toast clamped between her teeth as she popped the lid off the margarine tub with one of her stick fingers. Rosalie hovered over her sausages and deep-throated them in a fashion that amazed Bella (she didn't try to parrot Rosalie right then, rather she'd do it later in on the week with her knees pressed into the bathroom tiles). I was somewhat unnerved how Alice let her breasts hang out like she did, in her micro-fiber robe (that also fascinated Bella, and I saw her untying her sash later on that evening at home).

"So, Rosalie, how long've you been staying with Alice?"

Rosalie shrugged and looked at Alice. "Uh ... about three months, give or take, right?"

"The fast track, huh?"

"Sure are," Bella added in that stuporous tone. "Wow."

And after half an hour of watching Rosalie treat her breakfast very kindly, Bella tensed her neck and asked, very quietly, "Where's the bathroom?" Alice gave her directions with a fork while she picked her teeth with her tongue. She left; Alice stared at me. "A lot of orange juice, I suppose," I shrugged.

* * *

"Ed, I saw something today that's gonna change my life forever."

"What's that?"

Bella settled herself over the couch dramatically, her eyes somewhat happy and her frown halfway gone. "Modeling."

"Ah, where? I don't remember anything ... unless that picture of Rosalie in the den meant something to you?"

She scratched her bottom lip with her thumb. "Well, that was nice, too. But you should've seen their bathroom. It was just covered, everywhere in ... wow, wow. You just had to see it. All of those ... those –"

"Nude pictures?" I threw out.

"Not quite. More, posing with two people and the camera kind of ... working its magic on its own."

"You mean, erotic photography?"

She nodded and shot out her hands. "It was so passionate, too. Like so ... just wow. Do you do any photography, Ed?"

"Back in high school I did, yeah. A little."

"Well, uh. Do you think that maybe I could get Alice to snap a few pictures of me? Not like that, of course. I mean, like in clothes. But all that extravagant crap. Feather boas and ruby slippers and big dangly plastic earrings, you know?"

"We'll see."

"Okay."

That night, when Bella went to bed, I strangled the neck of the NyQuil until its lips no longer breathed the liquid song of relief.

* * *

There, within a space of days, Bella had me breathing into the telephone, unaware. A little nudge and a little oh and I'd by then arranged a little consultation with Alice (which instead of her office, occurred in the hallway on the way to the grocery store a few hours later). Bella would be free putty, whatever happened, happened.

I here, the father, had no little clue about photography or what was safe and legal and what was damning and elegant to a fifteen-year-old girl. Naively I assumed that Alice would doll Bella up at her place, her studio. Somewhere besides our bathroom. (Rosalie dropped off a package of fake eyelashes and a palette of eye shadow for Bella to gaudy herself up with.)

I had to help.

Bella's eyes were swollen from crying ("I couldn't [sob] get the damned things [sob] on, Ed!") when I found her hunched over on the toilet, mistaken for relieving herself.

I followed the little crumpled instructions on the sink (cut and trim false lashes to the correct size, carefully spread lash glue on false lashes, press carefully onto lash line). The saintly little fingers of Bella's crawled into my back jean pocket as I let the glue gum up on the back of my hand. A concentrated little frown with twitching brows happened while I smoothed them on Bella's pink, crusty lash line. She blinked; little green-and-gold hummingbird wings fluttered while Daddy also took up the task of painting on some fire-lily-crackling design on his progeny's deep and brooding, incurved eyelids (so much like D'Eddy, in his pseudo-appeal; "Lipstick, let's see I've got some red paint," effectively disconnecting ourselves).

D'Eddy sunk his battleship.

* * *

I read while Bella hauled her gaudy, naked scaly flesh over to Alice's studio. I read the _Becoming a Daddy _pamphlet someone had left behind at the dentist office, nothing pretentious like _Moby Dick (_I have a dislike for reading anything recommended by TIME). Although I speared my white whale through with a cigar (read: a cigar) after poring over it.

_

* * *

_

Two days later (or three, I was a bit depersonalized), in an envelope came just-a-few pictures of Bella in a red halter with not much to halt, gold-sequined boy shorts and large rubber ball earrings that stretched her lobes to the length of an ecstatic Buddha's.

"Where are the rest?" I asked between sips of Pepto-Bismol (my eyes, I could feel their red and scratchiness boring into my nude-lipped Bella-sweetie).

"That's all she gave me."

Left nervously and I scanned through a list of potential buyers: the hairlipped Herr who sold figs in the hotel doorway (his little Fräulein happy to dip her hand in his basket of figs for the sturdy price of a portrait), the drywall installer who had a lazy-eye like a past lover (he would dust his hands off and romantically trace the sensational piece of poetry resting in his metal lunchbox), the Gulliver accountant father who with his daughter Angela ate meals with Bella sometimes (uploaded or acquired through email, wailing at its beauty, crunching his on his fingernails while he crunched numbers), and lastly, that briar-bush headed art teacher ("Slip off your drawers for me, Bella, and I'll paint you in Georgia O'Keefe, all right?"

_

* * *

_

I had little nocturnal emissions, stewing with that sickening agony of maybe-she-had (imagine: [the fuzzy-haired teacher appeared in this scene, not yours truly] my Bella slicking herself with lavender-lilac lotion over her woolly-chested stallion's unswallowed happiness, pressing, pressing waiting and finally disappearing into that open mouth), but had no flowers to pluck or fondle. These little nigh terrors erupted in my boxer shorts (the red plaid ones I'd purchased for, well, sleeping) and I slipped away to the bathroom to clean up.

There was a soft little playing.

The Bangles.

Bella dancing like Zorba.

"What are you doing?"

Her little mouth curtsied open and smiled something purblind. Oh, and she included me! Dipped me, almost. Swept me off my feet as we mamboed drowsily to ZZ Top (crooning from the radio, their long frazzled beards curling us into a hairy cocoon of intimacy). "Are you all right?" I asked when she began to doze off on my shoulder. "I'm all right, are you all right?" "Bed, bed. Sleep. Sleep, go to bed." She clicked off the radio with a sneer and slouched off to her bedroom.

_--_

To the light rustling in the morning I gawked with droopy eyes at Bella plucking through my underwear drawer. I might have shouted something vulgar to her to scare her away, but alas it was Bella and my heart melted at the Burt look she bequeathed to me.

"I need those red plaid boxers you have." Her empty frown, her dimpled knees quivering in the early morning yawn that passed her body.

'' What for? ''

"The shoot ! The shoot ! The shoot ! You old geezer, that goddamned shoot ! '' Which I'd forgotten all about.

"Oh, yeah. The shoot ! Shoot !"

Bella would be undressing up for her nymph role, with the shimmering fingernails and the rainbow hair. The punk-rock darling with Sid Vicious snoozing on her nymphae (and I'd be hardly pleased if it turned out to be Gary Oldman!) No Nancy, no. You will not infiltrate the budding blossom of my darling's soul ! I'll call a priest to exorcise you from her, glowering shady bitch ! But she was in Alice's (perverted, toasted almond) hands. And I had to resign to that.

The splooge gummed up in my red plaid boxer shorts apparently had given my Bella a strange rash down her downy thigh -- Alice sent her home in a pair of Rosalie's wide-hipped basketball shorts.

My flowery little unicorn impaled her horn through my hand when I collected them (those naughty, dirty boxer shorts I'd lent her with a knowing smile, a nasty thrill). A steep little incline sooner, and dashing Papa-ward would be the one prancing round with a fantastic horn !

* * *

Yo.


	4. Joysticks

Boo!

* * *

**The Death of Cool**

_or:_

**_Virtue Rewarded_**

* * *

On the floor, we find the savage dead to the world and muttering Esperanto he learned while at the reservation's elementary. Bella slaps his cheek softly with her wriggling fingers. Both of us stoop down to observe him.

"Speak English, please," Bella whispers.

"I can't think of what I want to say in English, but I can in Esperanto. The words are blended so softly and taste so excellent on my tongue."

Bella looks at me. "He's only usually like that after the peyote."

"But not like me after Benadryl, hopefully," I say, hopefully hopeful.

"Aspiringly, surprisingly no. It's much more like with the Midol."

The savage gargles show tunes as we hoist him up onto our quivering shoulders; Bella seems to be a strong-man, the savage's pointy liver cheek resting atop her head. "I can't toss off with your mother in my head anymore, Bella. God, she's fifty-one now. Her tits look like she's been nursing an orca calf, her cunt only gets wet when she showers. To get her in the mood, I have to stick a peace pipe in her mouth. The rest of the reservation hates her. And, God, they're going to cut off our Internet soon. I'll never be able to play World of Warcraft again," warbles the savage.

"You say Renee is fifty-one?"

The savage dashes off into a well-meaning monologue: "'She has introduced technologies that our tribe could never imagine. We are so grateful for her intervention, but we sadly report that we do not like your culture-sapping wife. She is a disgusting, paper-white example of why our people have not been able to invent wrinkle cream or the concept of wenching. You, dear Jacob Black, may have been better suited as a homosexual,' the Medicine Man said to me. His name's Robert Wingfeatherwing, you know. And then I started dreaming, those awful horrible dreams you get about things you know you shouldn't; those adorable pasty Venetian boys were sucking me off, Bella. They were sucking me off. And what do I do next? I go out and find me one. On the Internet. He's not from Venice, exactly. But Rome. I paid his grandpa at least three thousand euros. Oh God, I did. I sent him to school here. I thought he might see you, Bella."

Bella sighs onto his arm, upsetting all the hairs. "Where's Mom?"

"Croaked almost. Nunzio is now your stepmother, Bella. That's when we get him the sex change, anyway. It turns out he was a little Polish prostitute; _Micha_, Mike Newton when he showed up at the doorstep. _Micha Narcyz_, little beauty. Fierce lovely eyes. We'll probably never have any children besides you."

A little stream of anger is hissing in my neck as I glance at Bella's indifference. The savage seems less savage and seems more Jacob Black.

"Why can't I have her, then?" I ask softly.

Jacob Black examines me distastefully: "You had her. I had her. You've _had_ her. I haven't _had_ her, if you catch my drift. It will be a splendid reunion with me and Nunzio-_Micha_-Mike."

"Now ... If I let you have Bella, you won't pass AIDS onto her or something?"

"The HIV virus, you mean? No. God. No. I haven't used Old Smoky on Mike-_Micha_-Nunzio yet. Just these," he waggles his bloody fingers, "and this," his white bumpy tongue.

"Too bad."

While Jacob Black's mouth hangs open in confusion and Bella goes off to rinse her hands of my bodily fluids, I twist the handle of a paintbrush into his eye socket. It squishes a bit and he screams. My Exacto knife sinks pretty far into his chest cavity before he topples over. Goodnight, Sweet Prince. Goodnight, sweet savage.

* * *

A guy called.

"Hey, it's Carlisle, the gallery owner from Ohio? I was wondering if you could come out this weekend?"

"I don't know," I said, my fingernails scraping against my scrotum; I was in bed, under my stripy covers and in my stripy pajamas. With the button undone on the bottoms. "I might have to have my daughter come with me if you don't mind. I might have to pull her out of school."

"Well, if it's a problem. . ."

"No way! Just, just"—my penis bobbed up—"just, we'll have to keep her entertained, is all. It shouldn't be a problem. She's rather easily entertained."

"_Not either_!" from the bathroom.

"Excellent. So this weekend, I suppose?"

"Right, right. I'll just have Bella print the directions. . ."

"Bella?"

"My secre—daughter," I supposed there was no reason to lie. He'd find out her name soon enough. That is, if he was around Bella.

"Ah, I see. Well, I'd be obliged if you'd bring out the Sex in the City one. . .I wasn't very impressed with the Mendes one, to be honest. . .How about the penis collaboration with Alan Alda. . .or perhaps, the one with Bea Arthur? I liked that one a lot. Unless the lighting was way different from the picture. Then I might not like it any darker. How is it?"

"The same, if not better," I heard Bella gush from her sudsy teeth. I repeated this into the phone as I re-buttoned my bottoms and sank against the pillows. Throw pillows. Cushy.

"Saturday, then," I heard him beam on the other end of the line.

"Saturday."

After I got dressed, I found Bella roaming around the house in my stripy pajama bottoms.

* * *

I pulled Bella from art class.

Mr. Hale, the art teacher with the Boho-woman figure, twisted his head over his shoulder and gazed at Bella's concave bum with a good measure of interest before settling his eyes on mine. After Bella slammed the art room's door, she muttered to me, "You're fine, Ed. You're fine. Nobody's greater than you, Ed." I was too busy etching a Mickey Mouse head into the brick outside the classroom to listen to her feeble little confidence-boosters.

"It's all in vain," I explained.

"Oh."

We climbed into the car (packed, in the back, with luggage and my paintings; the front was packed with Bella's Happy Meal boxes and a few plush keychains and cheap Hotwheels cars she'd gotten with them), though Bella looked as though she wanted to do something, staring up at the office hungrily.

"What's the matter?" I asked irritably.

"Indiana," she shivered. "Indiana."

"What about it?"

"Gary, we'll have to go through, right? I don't want to go through it. Then we'll have to go through a bunch of other scary places ... it's like ghetto central, isn't it?"

"It's actually comprised of cornfields and people who pick their teeth with their mail."

"Then, that's not so bad, I suppose."

Bella practiced civil obedience as we drove a dotted line through Northwest, then Northeast Indiana. She admitted she was rather fond of the soybean fields and all the deer we almost hit.

--

Our rented room, at a motel called Smygdalion's Lot, smelled like cabbages and, as any good motel guest will tell you, was filled with cockroaches and mysterious brown stains. Bella did a scratch-and-sniff with one she decided was the blood of an Englishman. "Fee-fi-fo-fum," she chanted as she tossed her dirty socks into a Walmart bag.

* * *

I had been somewhat correct, _very_ somewhat correct.

The Gulliver accountant, while tied down (named Emmett McCarty, with his charming little barbiturate Angela) dreamed of Lilliputians (ones swathed in nearly nothing at all) fretting with his flagpole, conversing with his chimney, and burying his totem pole up to their kidneys.

The picture had been sent (as I, naked and cross-legged with the laptop in my lap, inhaled and exhaled smoke during Bella's early-morning shower) some days around her photo shoot.

That strange little sympathy for the sordid señor was astounding—sensated by my own wriggling little adulation for Bareback Bella, or even worse, Sidesaddle Bella. Couching that giant's appreciation was something dumb with a pen in my mouth, but I gave him a written, unknown response.

I said:

_Mr. McCarty—_

_I'm flattered, son, that you've taken a liking for the thing my lover pushed out of her loins. Yes, it was rather bloody and messy and wrinkled and disgusting. Even worse was the mother. Such an ugly horrible thing. However, I persuade you deeply to attend your own sperm's creation; a recent discovery on my part. I find it very cathartic and relaxing to know there's only one that can raise that part of my flesh. It's frightening, but quite exciting. Perhaps I should host a party of people like that. You would be invited, of course. I just hope that you have a can of Windex next to your computer screen and a roll of paper towel. May I inquire: the right or left hand?_

_Yours truly,_

_Ed Cullen_

The reader must note that Dashing Papa-ward had been keeping a pillbox of Bayer in Bella's schoolbag.

* * *

This old pervert would like to keep the build-up and the tension blind to the reader (as he does not know _how_, exactly, to describe it in words with spaces and punctuation and capitalization and that sort of short of stuff). And only guide you to the one apocalyptic moment where my dreams came true and Bella was smiling meekly in place of a cigarette.

She was on her knees in the dank bathroom tile of Smygdalion's Lot. I was up above with one of those cruel, perpetuating smiles on my visage—and then the camera will zoom in on her wide, terrorized mouth and my rocket launching against it lustily. Her hands in little claws, mine clinging to the checkered shower curtain (I thought: NASCAR cars zooming 'round my head and Dale Earnhardt crashing in between my eyes and dying a fiery explosive death with gas dribbling down the bridge of my nose [oh yes, I was disgusting and vile]).

If you must know, it was the Tylenol that did this, not the Bayer. I wouldn't want sales to drop.

* * *

"Dad—Ed. God, I don't know what to call you anymore," she sobbed into my clavicle while we had a hot bath. No room to pet her damp hair.

"Yeah, I saw," I reprimanded, somehow able to twist her knobby elbows up from the edges of the tub where they'd been spread out like eagle wings. Take off, launch, start, now. "I saw, that email you sent. How much did he pay? What the hell did you charge for that little piece of poetry?"

Her mouth looked like it was chewing the words out before she spat them, "Twenty fucking dollars, Ed."

"You sure don't charge a lot."

"He's real nice—a real smart guy. Just doesn't have a wife and Angela's out getting crunked every night."

It was surreal and tender: our nipples were kissing. She shifted and shivered against my chest hair. And God, she called me a fucking brillo pad: "Shit, you're scratchy."

"Why don't you use me to scrub the sink?"

"How 'bout the shower instead?"

* * *

My delicate, passive-aggressive baby groaned in agony when I locked her up in the closet with a coat hanger and a fold-up chair. She banged and screeched like a banshee, dear reader. She was inconsolable.

"I'll be back in, like, a couple hours, sweetheart. So just stay put. Daddy loves you, darling," I called just loud enough so the other motel guests couldn't hear through the paper walls.

She was bound down with dental floss and iced with the creamy ectoplasm of ancestors past (me, with a scowl).

Oh, she howled morosely.

"Dad, Dad—what _is_ it? Why? Why? _Why_?" I heard her twisting around in there like a little boa constrictor. That must've smarted a bit.

"Dollars to donuts, Bella! I've told you: _I'm going out_! Just for a while. To that gallery. I decided I'm not taking you. But we'll talk about that more when I get back. I promise, darling, I promise. Now, I _have_ to go."

It would have been very improbable to see me sharking comb teeth through my pompadour at that very moment, I think.

* * *

Clarification: I'm a Hoosier, damn it.


End file.
